Scouta.com closing to focus on recommendation web services

Over two years ago we were very excited to launch scouta.com, a social web site dedicated to providing free media recommendations to the masses. However, the underlying business model was always to license the core recommendation web service that powered scouta.com. Over time we have made it as simple as adding a few lines of JavaScript to an existing site to provide very meaningful recommendations, and we began speaking with a range of commerce, media, and social sites about using our engine.

Over that time, we’ve seen a rapid growth in these sites and at the same time the usage of the scouta.com social recommender has dropped off. So, the time has come to complete the transition, and as of today we are closing the scouta.com social recommender website.

We’d like to take the time to thank everyone who participated in the scouta.com site. Your usage, feedback, and encouragement was warmly welcomed, and we do look to continue interacting with you across the Net. We also hope to relaunch scouta.com one day in the future, and welcome you all back.

If you’re interested in keeping tabs on what we do now, and in the future, please feel free to keep an eye on this blog and the Recommendation Ventures website for more information.

Happy Birthday Scouta

Today is Scouta’s first birthday.

One year ago today we launched the Scouta web site, and started saving people time by providing recommendations for great video and podcasts.

It’s a very proud day, because the team has made some amazing things happen over the year. The site has grown in some awe inspiring ways, and not only that, but we’re just heading into even better days.

Stay tuned, but over the coming weeks we’ll announce a few exciting things:
- A flash audio player that saves you time by updating your favorites automatically.
- An API that will allow others to take full advantage of Scouta’s recommendations.
- Some partnerships and customers who are using the Scouta Recommendation Engine web service, to provide their own recommendations.

In the mean time, grab the Scouta Agent if you haven’t already, which provides you recommendations on your iTunes, iPod, iPhone and Apple TV library.

Migration complete

Migration done. We’ve moved the scouta.com site and associated dbs and spidering and processing servers from a couple of ‘big’ real servers into a much more flexible set of virtualized of servers that we can turn up and down for load and specialize for various tasks as we need to. More on why this is important to us will be revelaled one day soon.

It was a nice smooth changeover as far as we can see. If you seen anything broken that we’ve missed, please sing out… email us a feedback [at] scouta [dot] com.

Server migration

Over the next 24 hours or so .. that is from Fri 15 Feb to Sat 16 Feb .. we are migrating the core scouta services onto a brace of fancy new servers. So, we might have a little downtime during the transfer, but if we do, we’ll be back really soon.

Podcasting about Scouta

I’ve managed to get back in the podcasting game a little lately, thanks to a couple of good mates.

Cameron Reilly has been inviting me to co-host a show or two, which hopefully will become a little regular. We chatted last Sunday about a range of things from Castro to Scouta.

Dave Gray at the Global Geek Podcast also chatted with me last night, and the interview went live today.

I really enjoy doing podcasts, and even more so when prep and post are done by someone else :). It’s great to have a bit of a chin-wag with a couple of mates. So I hope I’ll get to chat some more over the coming weeks.

One I’m especially excited about is a chat I have scheduled with Mark Frauenfelder on his Rule the Web podcast. It’s conducted via Blog Talk Radio, which means anyone has the opportunity to dial in and ask a question. It’s scheduled for 4pm (PST) Wednesday August 8, so make sure you tune in and give us a call with any of your questions.

While you’re at it, check out his new book and website: Rule the Web. I’d recommend it to anyone who is interested in the Internet. It’s one of those books with interesting tidbits for any level of Internet user.

Beta Test Scouta for iTunes on Windows

Last week we released the Scouta Agent for Mac: a nifty piece of software that checks what podcast and vodcast subscriptions you have in iTunes, and uses those to provide personal recommendations. It then continues to provide recommendations based on what your watching and listening to in iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and the Apple TV.

Clinton, our application developer, is full tilt into development of the Windows version. As you’d expect, we’re eager to start testing how it runs, and see if we can pick up some of the bugs early. So, this is a call-out to anyone who uses iTunes on Windows to subscribe to podcasts and vodcasts.

The initial testing won’t do much, the updates aren’t actually send to our database, but it shouldn’t be too long before we can turn them on and you’ll start receiving recommendations.

If you’d be interested in helping us test, email feedback@scouta.com.

Scouta Launches Software for iTunes

Yesterday we made a release that I think is Scouta’s biggest event: we released our Agent for iTunes.

When Graeme and I first talked about the Scouta concept back in 2005, the key to it’s acceptance was ease of use. Graeme then spent weeks building a proof of concept that would allow our recommendations to be based on a member’s iTunes library. That has since been redesigned and improved, and yesterday was made public.

Basically the Mac version of our Scouta Agent for iTunes will update a member’s Scouta account with their podcast and vodcast subscriptions. It will then provide recommendations based on those that are listened to or watched. The clever part, if we do say so ourselves, is that it will only take into account the ones that you’ve almost completely watched or listened to. We figure that if you’ve only listened to a few minutes of a half hour show, it’s not a favorite.

What’s even cooler is it also works seamlessly with iPods, iPhones, and the Apple TV. I listen to podcasts on my iPod every day, and now watch video podcasts on my Apple TV. The new software means Scouta gives me personal recommendations without any extra effort. I literally just watch and listen to shows on these devices, and I receive new recommendations that are sent straight to the iPod or Apple TV.

The Windows version is currently in development, and should be available soon! We also hope to look into working with other media players. So, if there are any people who are keen to help us add support for other media software, let us know.

We also spent the best part of a month working on improving the look of the site, and adding some extra features that put conversations and activity updates right in to a member’s My Scouta page. It means that if you have friends using Scouta, or have joined a Scouta Group, you can easily share podcasts or video, or stay a part of the conversations.

Many thanks to Clint, our Agent developer, and Simon, our web developer, who have been tirelessly working on the code, making it an ace service that we’re all really proud of.

You can read about and download the Scouta Agent for iTunes here.

San Fran Power Outage

Who would have thought. The whole Scouta team is scattered around the world, yet one city suffers a power outage, and it can take down Scouta.

So, please bare with us, we’re working with our hosting provider to restore the site, but as you can imagine, with so many people and services effected it might take a little longer than normal.

Facebook group for Scouta

As you might expect, there’s a Scouta group on facebook.   If you are on facebook, drop by and join in.  I’m about to start a discussion there about the features we could put into a Scouta app for facebook.  See you over there.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2384414043

Technorati Tags: scouta, facebook

Scouta gets Icky Thumped: strange copyright loop

We received a DMCA takedown notice yesterday which is a first for us here at scouta.com. And it is a beauty.

Web Sherriff acting for the White Stripes sent us a DMCA takedown notice (asking us to remove content or links) for a YouTube video for the White Stripes’ Song Icky Thump which has been placed on YouTube by Warner Bros Records (the White Stripe’s label). 

There’s a strange copyright enforcement loop here and I’m sure you can see it:

1. Warner Bros Music put the video on YouTube.  They allow embedding and playing the video embedded.  You can still go there and embed the video in your blog. Go on.
2. The YouTube video get added to scouta favourites by a scouta user. (Scouta’s CEO Richard Giles, as it turns out)
3. Robots or humans at WebSherriff acting for the White Stripes, issue Scouta with a takedown notice for the Scouta fave (pdf).

Mad, isn’t it.  One arm adds something to YouTube and positively encourages sharing and the other arm issues takedown notices for sharing.  

It must be a mixup or confusion or overzealous robot, surely.

Anyway, in the meantime we’ve removed the link to YouTube (that’s just sensible when dealing with the DMCA) pending and explanation from WebSherriff.  There’s a link to this post instead on that scouta fave url.

I propose we call this kind of two-armed bumble an Icky Thump.

We’ll let you know what happens, and I’m sure we’ll have that item back in Scouta shortly.

More on this in an excellent article at TechCrunch.

[Update: there's now a Scouta Group to hold media around this story.  And Richard discusses the issue with Cameron Reilly on the G'Day World Podcast #259]